‘You were born in 1950,’ said Falcón, nudging him on.
‘Nine months to the day after they were married.’
‘And your sister?’
‘Two years later. There were some complications in her birth. I know they nearly lost her and it left my mother very weak. They wanted to have lots of children, but my mother wasn’t capable after that. It affected my sister, too.’
‘How?’
‘She was a very sweet-natured girl. She was always caring for things … animals, especially stray cats, of which there were plenty in Tangier. There wasn’t anything you could … she was just … ‘ he faltered, his hands kneaded the air, forcing the words out. ‘She was just simple, that’s all. Not stupid … just uncomplicated. Not like other children.’
‘Did your mother ever recover her strength?’
‘Yes, yes, she did, she recovered her strength completely, She …’ Jiménez trailed off, stared up at the ceiling. ‘She even became pregnant again. It was a very difficult time. My father had to leave Tangier, but my mother could not be moved.’
‘When was this?’
‘The end of 1958. He took my sister and I stayed.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘He rented a house in a village up in the hills above Algeciras.’
‘Was he on the run?’
‘Not from the authorities.’
‘A bad business deal?’
‘I never found that out,’ he said.
‘And your mother?’
‘She had the baby. A boy. My father mysteriously appeared on the night of the birth. He’d come over secretly. He was worried that something would go wrong, like the last time, and she wouldn’t survive the birth. He was …’
Jiménez frowned, as if he’d come up against something beyond his comprehension. He blinked against the interfering tears.
‘This is very difficult ground, Inspector Jefe,’ he said. ‘I thought that when my father died I would be pleased. It would be a relief and a release from … It would signify the end of all these unfinished thoughts.’
‘Unfinished thoughts, Sr Jiménez?’
‘Thoughts that have no ending. Thoughts that are interminable because they have no resolution. Thoughts that leave you forever hanging in the balance.’
Although these words were recognizable as language, their meaning was obscure and yet Falcón, without knowing why, understood something of the man’s torment. Hints prodded his own mind — his father’s death, the things left unsaid, the studio uninvestigated.
‘It may just be our natural state,’ said Falcón. ‘That in coming from complicated beings who are unknowable, we will always be the carriers of the unresolved and further compound it with our own irresolvable questions, which we in turn hand on. Perhaps it is better to be uncomplicated like your sister. To be uncluttered by the baggage of previous generations.’
Jiménez drilled him with animal eyes from under the brush of his brow. He fed on the words from Falcón’s mouth. He pulled himself up, cleared the intensity from his face.
‘The only problem there …’ he said, ‘… in my sister’s case, is that her lack of complexity gave her no system, no potential for reordering the chaos after the cataclysm hit our family. She lost her tenuous link with a structured existence and thereafter floated in space. Yes, I think that’s what her madness is like … an astronaut disconnected from his ship, spinning in a massive void.’
‘I think you’ve run ahead of me.’
‘I have,’ he said, ‘and I know why.’
‘Perhaps we should go back to your father fearing that your mother might not survive the birth.’
‘What I was thinking then, what I was confronting was the surprising memory, in view of later events, that my father was profoundly in love with my mother. It is something that even now I have a great difficulty in admitting. As a boy, when my mother died, I could never believe that of him. I thought he had set about breaking her.’
‘And how did you come to that conclusion?’
‘Psychoanalysis, Inspector Jefe,’ he said. ‘I never thought I would be a candidate for that quackery. I’m a lawyer. I have an organized mind. But when you’re desperate, and I mean full of despair, so that all you see is your own life collapsing around you, then you admit it to yourself. You say: “I’m nuts and I’m going to have to talk it out.”’
Jiménez levelled this explanation directly at Falcón, as if he’d seen something in him that needed attention.
‘So what happened to your mother and the baby?’ asked Falcón.
‘My mother needed some days to recover. I remember that time very well. We weren’t allowed out of the house. Servants were told to say nobody was at home. Food came in secretly from neighbours’ houses. Some armed men, who normally guarded the construction sites, were installed across the street. My father paced the floor like a caged panther, stopping only to look through a crack in the shutter if he heard something in the street. The tension and the boredom were there in equal measure. It was the start of the family madness.’
‘And you never found out what it was your father was afraid of?’
‘At the time I was a kid, I didn’t care. I just wanted to avoid being bored. Later … much later, I thought it was important to find out what it could have been that had driven my father to such lengths. So, thirty years after the event, I thought the only person to ask would be him. It was the last time we spoke on a personal level. And this is the magic of the human brain.’
‘What?’ asked Falcón, jumping in his seat, as if he’d missed the vital moment.
‘If we have something in there that we don’t like we bypass it. Like a river that’s tired of flowing around the same loop again and again, it just cuts through and joins up with the stretch of river beyond the loop. The loop becomes a small disconnected lake, a reservoir of memory which due to lack of supply eventually dries up.’
‘He forgot about it?’
‘He denied it. As far as he was concerned it had never happened. He looked at me as if I might be insane.’
‘Even with your mother dead and your sister in San Juan de Dios?’
‘It was 1995 by then. He was married to Consuelo. He was in a different life. The past could have been as distant to him as … a previous existence.’
‘Were you surprised by Consuelo?’
‘Her appearance?’ he said. ‘My God, I was stunned. It made my flesh creep. I burnt the photograph he sent of their wedding.’
‘So you got no help from your father?’
‘Only that what I thought I needed to know was unimportant. There was nothing in my father’s world, as far as I could see, that he could have possibly placed more value on than the life of a child. The admission was in his silence, in his flat denial, in the whole expression of his life … this marriage to his wife’s lookalike …’
‘Wouldn’t that have been torture?’
Jiménez gave a derisive snort.
‘If you could call the comfort of a beautiful woman a punishment … then, yes.’
‘You think he wiped the slate clean and started a new life?’
‘My father was an instinctive animal. The passages of his mind were not those of a normal human being. To be as successful a businessman as he — and I know because I work for some very successful men myself — you can’t think like ordinary people … and he didn’t.’
‘You’ve lost me again. Maybe you’re thinking too fast.’
Jiménez leaned across the table, jaw set.
‘Don’t believe for one moment that I don’t know what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘I have never spoken about these things before to anyone, other than the man who teased apart the knot in my brain. And you know why? Because I wouldn’t dream of infecting my wife’s peace of mind with such terrible things. They would blacken our home and we’d be left stumbling around in the dark.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Falcón.
Jiménez held up his hand in apology, realized he’d been too grave. He sat up and opened his shoulders.